The main band with whom I play, Ministry of Beaver, recorded its first demo with me on drums this weekend.
We recorded at Pride Rock Studios on Depper’s Bridge Farm, in Deppers Bridge, near Southam, Warwickshire. We played a private 18th birthday party there back in May and Dutch, the owner of the place offered us free use of the studio, so long as we paid for the engineer’s time.
As it turns out, the engineer Matt, who’s a school music teacher during the week, did an absolutely fantastic job. He loved my drum kit (apparently, he’d been raving to the trainee sound engineer who was there yesterday about how great Yamaha studio kits are to record) and I didn’t need to argue with him about not muffling the toms – he was absolutely fine with that. Hurrah!
We managed to get all the recording done yesterday (started setting up at 10:00 and finished at 18:00), except the backing vocals, which I did this morning before mixing started.
Recording went extremely well, with most parts recorded in one take. I’ve never known a band nail its parts so quickly in a studio. It does help if you’ve played them on stage, but we hadn’t played together before yesterday for some time, having all been on holiday.
When it came to mixing, Matt told us all to sod off out of the room… I smiled a knowing smile. When it comes to mixing, too many cooks definitely spoil the broth and a good sound engineer knows exactly what he’s doing, even when what’s coming out of the studio monitors doesn’t necessarily sound right to the musicians involved.
He called us back after each track for any comments/changes we wanted. There were very few – maybe 2 or 3 slight level changes in certain parts, but Matt had pretty much nailed the mix without a word from us.
The tracks can be heard on the Ministry of Beaver site (http://www.ministryofbeaver.com).
The recordings are sounding great!!!
Oh, that was me, Malc!